A: Mark Owens
Mark Owens is a designer, writer, and curator working between New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. He holds an MFA in graphic design from Yale University and an MA in English and literary theory from Duke University. For the past decade he has worked as an independent graphic designer, primarily for publishers and clients in the cultural realm, including JRP Ringier and Sternberg Press; ICA Boston; ICA Philadelphia; MAK Center, Los Angeles; the Carnegie Museum of Art; Walker Art Center; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, for whom he designed the 2014 Whitney Biennial catalogue. His work has been featured in the pages of IDEA (Tokyo), GRAPHIC (Korea), Library Paper, Phaidon's Area 2, and Graphic Design: Now in Production, among others.
Alongside his professional practice over the past decade Mark has also emerged as an important critical voice in design. In 2008 he co-edited with Zak Kyes the catalogue for the exhibition Forms of Inquiry at the Architectural Association, London, and his essays have appeared in Dot Dot Dot, Visible Language, Grafik, PIN-UP, Bricks from the Kiln, and Experimental Jetset’s recent monograph, Statement and Counter-Statement. He is also co-founder of the independent publishing imprint Oslo Editions with curator Alex Klein and a recipient of a Warhol Foundation Creative Capital Arts Writer's Grant for the completion of a forthcoming book of essays on the intersection of design, material culture, and post-punk aesthetics. He has served as a critic at Yale, RISD, and Art Center College of Design, and as visiting faculty in the MFA program at California Institute of the Arts and in PennDesign at the University of Pennsylvania. In Fall 2016 Mark served as A+D Guest Curator in the School of Art + Design at Purchase College, SUNY, where organized the exhibition The Surface of Design.